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27 Feb 2001 (Tuesday)
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Things in CVS. MP3s. |
Things in CVS :
There are quite a few interdependencies before this lot can be released, unfortunately. Actually I might move the CVS state to a web page in its own right, just... well, because I can, I guess.
Must reencode The Spirit Of Autumn Past, or at least the last track; it's
juddering all over the place 
.
I really love 'Now & Again'. It's really quite silly and fun and...
just nice. Tonights was quite fun, with him being lit up like a lightbulb
and dropped from an aircraft just to test the 'protective shield'. Ok, so
it was a bit contrived as a way to make him appear like an Angel, but...
cute nonetheless. And silly 
.
Submission filters rock in NewsBase. If there's one major complaint about MessengerPro, it's that it doesn't have Submission filters. Indeed, that's the only reason I've not moved over to using it all the time.
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CD Writer. Charmed. In Deep. |
Coo. Got my replacement CD Writer today. Which I'm well chuffed at, as I've not yet got around to returning the original. It does mean I can use the same box that the replacement came in, though :-) Top marks to Creative support for that from me anyhow. I may have got stressed at their online reporting, but Lynne who dealt with my report was curteous and very helpful. The only thing 'odd' I can report is that the drive they've given me is a different model to that which I reported the fault on - I reported it on an RW8433E and they've sent me an RW8432. The difference ? The 8433 had one light for writing and one for reading, whereas the 8432 only has a single light. The 8433 also has a slightly different volume control, is slightly shorter (yes, it's not quite so big as the one I've got now - not a problem though) and the 8433 has the connection legend on the metal back plate instead of the top label. The 8432 has a much clearer top label for finding the details, too. The facia on the 8432 looks better than the 8433 I think actually. Overall, a big plus for them anyhow.
Anyhow, it does mean I've now managed to write my little CDs I had waiting. One for Pendragon and one for 'Folk/Rock'. 'Folk/Rock' is a category I'm not entirely sure about, but I understand it, which is all that matters. Basically it's a short CD with Celtus, Mostly Autumn and John Wesley on. Really, quite a lovely combination. I say short; it's 500MB now that I've added the new Album. I've barely listened to the new album, but it sounds kinda samey. I say that in a not-bad way. I was concerned that it might end up very pop-y, because it's quite hard to retain the original feel of your music. I think that The Corrs are a good example of how you can drift away from the initial focus. Not that that is a bad thing either, and I like the third album of the Corrs, but it's just different... Anyhow, to return to Celtus, it's still got the instrumentals I love so much, and it's still got their lovely voices. Another good thing today.
Charmed today, too. Some days are just so great. So, anyway, Charmed had the sisters thrown back into the past to save a baby - their great-to-the-power-of-whatever-it-would-be-in-the-1600s grandmother. And Phoebe got to fly on a broomstick, Piper got to deliver a baby and Prue... Well... Prue got to cut some apples. I can't help thinking that Prue got the bad deal there.
And then there's 'In Deep' which is quite scarey. It's Stephen Tomkinson (from Drop the Dead Donkey - well, that's what I know him from) and ... bother I've forgotten his name... But anyhow, they're undercover policemen trying to break a paedophile ring. Stephen pulls off a nasty thug quite well, whilst still being likeable - that was particularly showing in last weeks double where they were after three policemen who were running drugs out of a prostitution hostel.
And later, there was Angel. An Episode I've got as a dodgy MPEG (or ASF; I've no idea really). Buffy returns, all annoyed that Angel came to spy on her and the gang when she was in trouble. If they were shown at the same time as the BBC2 episodes it'd have worked much better. C4 and the BBC really could have pulled off a winner there, just with a little negotiation. However, I'll put money on it being the BBC who wouldn't want to do that. They always deal more with what is the most likely to get their audience - and bizarre as it may sound to me, Snooker and Tennis win over Buffy, Star Trek, DS9, Simpsons and all over 6pm slot programs. It does just make you feel that those programs (or rather that slot) is just a filler until something 'more interesting' comes along. And that's a bit irritating. But it's the taxpayers money being spent, so obviously we have to have the sport there.
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Sound. |
I've got the 16bit sound interface installed now. So I can actually try out some of the things I never could before. Like Doom's setup music. That's quite nice. And Hexen's. Coo; that's cool. Tried playing Heretic, too... I really do like them. They're quite neat.
Hmm... Got something of a shock trying to run Doom+, as well. 'This copy of Doom+ has expired. Please contact your supplier'. Um... Ok... Justin, this copy's expired, what do I do ? Pass... I've no idea.
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Spaced. |
Yay! Spaced is back on Channel 4. At the same time as Angel, unfortunately.
But I can record it. There was a lovely section today, with the Pulp Fiction
pop-tart making murder. Very cool. 
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AMPlayer. Filer Memory. |
My filer interface (JFiler henceforth) is really quite impressive now. I've got the foreground and background colours working. Window replacement works (so that I can close the old window behind me) quite well. Scrolling so that an item is in the view works, and I've got a little dotted outline around the highlight, and the highlight can be any colour. Even the root directory is selectable. I'm very happy with it, actually. It's meant quite a lot of changes to the various libraries I've got to make it work, though. It's really only a prototype anyhow, but the bonus is that the Filer library is a lot faster now and I've got background colouring. I've got a 'directory filer' library, that can handle redrawing various objects in a true filer fashion, including filetypes datestamps and - because it's derived from my FTP client - owner, group and unix-style attributes. A very strange beast, it's turned out to be.
Finally fixed the stereo bug in AMPlayer today; it was playing things the
wrong way around before. I ended up fixing it, forgetting I'd fixed it, and
then re-fixing it again. I'm tired. But it is now 5am and
I've not slept yet. I'm still determined to finish this filer interface to a
sensible point before the end of the week. Quite why the end of the week,
I'm not sure, but it'll do for now.
Chatting to RedRum tonight on Egham - hey, there was nobody around and it's nice to chat to people - was very strange. In any case, we got talking about Angela and Helen. I knew my memory was bad, but I've apparently met him when I went down to see Helen once. I don't remember. I can believe it, though. I forget things so easily.
Speaking of which, I got a letter from Claire a few days ago. I opened it
and decided to read it that evening, but was too tired and then I forgot.
Then tonight, whilst I was fitting the 16 bit sound upgrade (bah, testing, I
hate it) I managed to read a little bit of it (hands doing one thing, mind
doing another) and I stopped. It was her saying how I wasn't talking to her,
or keeping in contact. I know, I don't keep in touch with friends. I ought
to, but I don't. I tried ringing her then, but there was no answer. I feel
quite guilty in a specific way, for a change. I intend to contact people,
but just forget; as if it's not important. It is important to me, but... it
just slips my mind. I've been meaning to talk to Sue and Vanessa as
well, and Dave. And Chris, too. Oh and Alistair and Phil. My life is
a mess. And why ? Because I'm too self involved with what I'm doing. I
suppose that's the price of being obsessive about things. You go at them
with a lot of energy, to the exception of anything else. As I sit here at
5am, 'Sleep' springs to mind as an exception that I really should pay
attention to.
Memory. It's not what it was. If it ever was all that great. I find myself
going downstairs for things, and coming back again having completely
forgotten why. I don't like it. Yeah; it's amusing, but it's not nice to
know that you can't even remember that you wanted a drink, or whatever. Or
that the reason you're hungry is that you had intended to get some breakfast
but forgot. I say breakfast, because I always forget lunch. Breakfast is
less regularly forgotten.
Stop whinging, Justin.
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Toy Story 2 video. Filer. Goodnight Sweetheart. |
Mmmm... Toy Story 2... Mmmm... As MPEG... Mmmm... On RISC OS... Mmmm... With sound... Mmmm...
I just thought I'd write a filer replacement, for the laugh. So, pulling in the bits from the FTP client I started writing, the Filer library, and a few other bits, I've now got a little 'root' window that shows me the root directory. Cool, huh ?
Ok, so I can't actually do anything with it, except stare at it and say 'coo'. But still... it's not bad for half an hour.
I saw the very last Goodnight Sweetheart tonight. It was quite strange to
see, really. I've not watched so many of the later series, but it was kinda
reassuring to know it was there. I know it actually finished many moons ago,
but UK Gold have been showing it again.
Haven't heard anything from Helen for a little while; I guess she's busy. I always feel bad about contacting her, 'cos I think I'm being pushy. Oh well.
With the nice Filer thing near-complete, I've now got to go back and read the plugin protocol documentation. 'cos I've no idea how to do what I want to do !
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MP3. |
![[Quote]](../images/quoteleft.gif){kind=small} |
... I would not worry too much about Layer III. Layer II is where it's happening ...[ MPEG FAQ, MPEG audio; Berkeley ] |
![[Quote]](../images/quoteright.gif){kind=small} |
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Vanessa. Dido. IRMan. |
Coo; got a nice email from Vanessa earlier today. That's quite a surprise. Actually I'd intended to get around to speaking to a lot more of my friends, but time seems to pass so quickly...
Bought the Dido album... oh, about two weeks back now... I think it's great, and I've been listening to it quite a bit. Probably at some point I'll get around to putting it on the 'female artists' CD, but that'll be once the CD writer is fixed. Yeah, really.
I've been playing with IRMan for a few days. It's really quite a neat little
thing. Although, to be honest, I've not got it any more working than
previously. It works in exactly the same way, but the module to control it is
a lot nicer now. Mostly because it is able to 'know' about different remotes
and decode the button press into a button name, if you've given it a
description of that remote. Better still, each of the remotes is described in
a little XML file. It makes parsing things so much easier when I can just use
a 'standard' file format and throw that file at the parser. No messing with
writing parsers any more. Just use the one I've already got. And people say
code reuse is foolish (no, they don't... it's just... a joke).
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It's a Wonderful Life. AMPlayer. Alyssa Milano. |
Watched 'It's a Wonderful Life' tonight with Mum and Dad. I'd not seen it before; it's a lovely film. I've seen the beginning of it before, but must have got called away.
Robin's set up a mailing list for AMPlayer betas. This should, hopefully, give it a little more testing. That would be good. The main thing is that it needs major amounts of testing before we consider it stable.
I sent around AMSpectre 1.09 to a group of friends and the general concensus is 'damned cool'. Strange really, as it's identical to 1.08 but I've included a totally different UI file with it. As a skinnable, generic interface, I think it's pretty damned cool. But the 1.08 demos didn't show that off to the extent that 1.09 does. 1.09, because of the extra work I put into the simple 'skin' for it gets a much better response form people. So, what do I learn from this ? The same thing you do from anything generic. You can give people generic things, but unless you make them useful from the first they won't pay attention. I've seen this with many projects, and you really have to work at these things to make them get a good response.
I've got to see 'Commando' again now. Just to see Alyssa Milano in it and go
'what ?!'
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Waiting for a star to fall. |
![[Note]](../images/musicnote.gif){kind=small} |
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Niall. Helen. Phoebe. |
I read Niall's diary again today. He's having a bad time of it, so I dropped him an email. I've not really spoken to him in more than passing for about two years. I share some of his disillusionment with the world, though certainly not on the scale he does.
Not much else today; I got an email from Helen a few days ago, but I've not really read it. I Really feel guilty for that, but that's just because I've been lazy and scared, still.
Also, a couple of emails from nice people about things. That's about as specific as I'm going to be. Oh, and a phone call from David Gamble, which was nice.
I'm tagged up to 'Simon And Garfunkel' now. Phew.
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Watched 'The Talented Mr Ripley' tonight, too. That was really good, actually. I thought it'd be 'ok', but I really enjoyed it.
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I really think that 'No Angel' is another great album. Female artist. Again. I'm not good at saying what I like and dislike, am I ?
Interesting. That's all I'll say; The site speaks for itself.
I've just found out that Phoebe did stuff in the late 80's. Not as Phoebe.
As Alyssa Milano. 4 albums, apparently. Amazing .
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MP3 tagging. CVSWeb update. |
Well, I've spent a thrilling hour or so today tagging the MP3s from D
through to M with the right ID3v1 tags. Golly, that's fun. But it does mean
that I've got a lot more tagged than I had, which has to be a bonus when it
comes to actually using it in an interactive environment (ie with the front
end ).
Finished my updates to CVSWeb today; I've not done much. Just changed the
icons it uses to RISC OS style ones and made it select RISC OS file sprites
if ,xxx is identified in the filename, and added support for
diffing and displaying BASIC files. Not too hard.
CVSWeb also now supports hiding of modules (that actually works - the code that it had in there was just rubbish), as well as the ability to display log entries in full if specified as such. Another minor improvement, that's quite specific to my site, is that it strips out the 'summary' of the log entry for the short version. In general, log entries here follow a simple format :
Summary: <One line summary of changes> Details: <Bulleted list of the actual changes, preferably including why things were changed> Admin: <testing state, bugs still known to be present, other comments>
So, the short form of the last log entry becomes the 'one line summary' section. Which actually works really well. If your source happens to be logged in that format, of course.
Actually, looking through the repository is quite nice now that I've got these things in place.
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IRC. David Cotton. First Contact. Julian Home. |
Brief entry tonight; tired.
Got fed up with IRC and left. For good this time.
Got a nice email from David Cotton about the diary; I'll make comments on it
tomorrow .
Julian's home today, and we watched First Contact with Mum and Dad during tea.
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Forecast. |
Been playing with 'Forecast' today. It's now quite nicely using the URL fetchers, and no longer leaks memory. Well, that is, the URL library doesn't. It was the main culprit.
And, as a bonus, I've implemented a little command to do a 'diff' of two BASIC files, one in CVS and one out of CVS. Why is this useful ? Because a lot of my code is BASIC, so why not allow me to diff the files ?
I've also got CVSWeb doing BASIC diffs, too. Admittedly that was a bit harder, but Bas2Txt compiled first time until linux (I think I've done that before so it's not entirely surprising), and then I just had to modify cvsweb to support it. Dead easy. Um. Yeah.
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Sue. Patrick Mortara, RiscSearch. |
Nice email from Sue today; I've not heard from her in ages! Apparently she's got a new phone since I spoke to her last, hence why I couldn't speak to her. Anyhow; I hope to keep in touch now.
I reported a few bugs in RiscSearch a few days ago. Alright, I was actually really angry 'cos it didn't work, and I couldn't fix it because the BASIC source wasn't included, only an absolute compressed version. Anyhow, as I usually do, I wrote to the author and told them of the problems and what I thought was up, as well as suggestions about what other little things they might improve. I got a reply back a little later that day, with full source and I tracked the fault down to a non-LOCAL variable; easy thing to do. So I sent this back, and he's now released an updated version with this fix in. That's about a two day turnaround, on a bug. I'm impressed. Particularly as I'm not usually too pleasant when I report problems. But Patrick was really nice. I hope that he has a lot of support.
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Log messages. Women. URL module. SysLog. |
Looking through my logs today, I found the following log messages :
revision 1.3.2.4 date: 1999/11/11 16:01:26; author: justin; state: Exp; lines: +1 -82 What do turkeys say all day ? gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble ---------------------------- revision 1.3.2.3 date: 1999/11/11 14:24:09; author: justin; state: Exp; lines: +1 -0 More testing thingies... No one out there baby, no one else like you; lives out in this world. I've got a love that I cling on to. ...
I'm not entirely sure what I was trying to test there, but... well, it's different.
The silly thing is that I knew straight away that the lyric was from a Deacon Blue track, and I was reasonably sure it was Love And Regret. But I'm not so sure now.
[Note made 2nd March: David Cotton pointed out that this was Loaded, not Love and Regret - thanks David]
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Mum: I should introduce you to Stephen ?[ Women; Mum ] |
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URL_Status is broken WRT the 'response code'. To say that's
irritating doesn't really stress it enough.
Coo... Syslog has reached 'draft 4'. It's only been 'a few years' that it
has been in use .
If bored, check out the internet draft explaining a 'new meaning' for keywords in RFCs.
Yet another log message I found lying around :
When I was walking in the summer, I saw an old veteran gunner, He wished I was dead, And shot me in the head. On that beautiful day in summer.
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Search. |
Finally added a 'search' option to the site. Nothing special; just uses FreeFind. Oh, and the icon is by Chris 'drobe' Williams. Nothing much else. Tried to get the LCD panel working. Haven't succeeded yet. I will do. If it kills me.
Oh, and look, we've got 'February' entries now too.
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Gillian Kearney. |
I got an email today about Gillian Kearney. I don't know who from - they didn't include their name (and hence got filed in the 'junk' group that I only glanced at), but in any case, it mentions a discussion group about her on yahoo. I'm not too bothered, and I've got too much email at the moment to be dealing with that, but if anyone is interested try http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GillianKearney.
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![[Track]](../images/track.png){kind=small}
Waiting For A Star To Fall![[Artist]](../images/artist.png){kind=small}
![[Album]](../images/album.png){kind=small}
The Greatest Hits Of The Monkees